The Effects of Mathematics Education Program linked to Outdoor Movement Activities on Mathematics Ability and Tendency of young children

Park, Ji-Hee; Cho, Hyung-Sook

doi:10.20437/koaece25-5-06

Cited by 1 publication

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“…Young children have been observed to apply the resources that nature provides, sticks, rocks, and leaves to construct shelters and use these “loose parts” (Nicholson, 1972) as technological tools (Speldewinde & Campbell, 2023). The incorporation of movement activities provides young children with opportunities to relate to “specific experiences on the relationship of quantity, number recognition, counting, space and geometry, patterns, and simple operations” (Park, 2020, p. 67). These are the opportunities that prevail for young children through attending bush kinders to develop greater understandings of the environment.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bush Kinders: Building Young Children’s Relationships with the Environment

Speldewinde,

Campbell

2023

Aust. J. environ. educ.

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Early childhood is an important time for building children’s affinity with nature and the environment. Early childhood professionals play a crucial role in developing young children’s understanding of the natural world. Over the past 50 years, there has been a movement in early childhood education and care contexts to provide young children with the opportunity to learn in natural surroundings such as forest schools and nature kindergartens. This research, occurred in four bush kinders, an Australian example of nature-based, early years education influenced by the forest school approach to education. In this paper we interrogate key ideas concerning environmental education, drawing on seminal empirical research, guiding curriculum documents such as Australia’s Early Years Learning Framework and government policy documents to build understandings of how children’s play can be observed by educators who can then support the children to develop their understandings of the natural world around them. Through ethnography, a methodology that uses both participation and observation of research participants, it became apparent that young children’s play-based learning offers opportunities for development of understandings of the environment. Applying a recent definition of environmental education from the US Environmental Protection Authority (2022), we analysed four vignettes which provide examples of educators and children’s interactions supporting children to build an affinity with nature observed during the research. This research’s implications are novel when considering the relatively new bush kinder approach to early childhood education as the findings remind us of the benefits of bush kinders in generating opportunities for young children’s environmental education.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%